Break Up is a single-channel live audio installation with moving objects. Seen here installed in the bowels of the Evans School, Denver CO as part of The Rite of Spring …Break! a group exhibition curated by Emilie Trice, March 2022.

This piece was created in direct response to the site, the basement machine room of the historic Evan’s School through which the heated air for the building was circulated by vast belt driven fans. It was an evocative space, the former lungs of the building. I wanted to bring mechanical breath back to the space for the single night of the show.

Encountering the work through the doorway to the room, a visitor was confronted with sheets of metal foil, stretched across the threshold of the door so that the end points were not visible. An invisible oscillating fan with a work lamp clipped to it would rhythmically pass across the foil, which would billow and rustle accordingly, while also reflecting and refracting the light back into the room. A contact microphone attached to the fixed end of one of the sheets would amplify the resultant sound, and in the event the noise passed a certain threshold, the distant sound of schoolchildren at play would be heard, a nod to the history of the building, which was opened in 1904 and for many years was the only school that served deaf, blind, or physically disabled students..